Girl-Made Birthday Stuff

I was very lucky to get a bunch of great gifts for my birthday – an iTunes gift card, a great tie, a DVD about the Copper Country (where I grew up), and both malted milk balls and a medicine ball. I also received some great stuff from the girls. Each girl wrapped her stuff in home-made wrapping paper, which unfortunately doesn’t translate well to the computer screen. “Plus also” (as Julia says, channeling Junie B. Jones), Vivi made this gorgeous card for my “best daughters” to sign:

Birthday Card (one side)

Birthday Card (the other side)

and Julia made these two animals, which she drew onto cardboard, then cut out and colored with markers. She chose these two animals after asking me what were my favorite “predators.” (Coincidentally, the first graders learned about these two animals in preparation for their upcoming field trip to the zoo.) These scans don’t do the animals justice!
Gray Wolf

Tiger

Jazz (History) Is Over (part I)

Yesterday I sat for the final exam for the “Jazz History” course I’ve been taking this term, a course taught by Steve Kelly, who is about to retire after a long, distinguished career at Carleton. I took the course because I wanted to learn more about the history of jazz, a musical style that I love but know very little about. I wasn’t disappointed. Kelly was a great teacher, both as a conveyor of technical knowledge about jazz and as a teller of stories about his own experience playing and hearing jazz. By the end of the term, I had a far better sense of the history of jazz, of the key players and periods in that history, and of the rudiments of the technical aspects of the music.

Though this was pleasing, I was well prepared to realize this goal. Having studied an awful lot of history in my life, I was equipped to understand the periodization of jazz, and to start to map the connections and disconnections between periods – say, the swing era that ended during World War II and the bebop era that started then. Putting particular musicians and pieces into those periods was no harder.

Where I did falter, and had to work pretty hard, was in trying first to understand some of the technical dimensions of jazz music (or, really, any music) and then to apply that understanding in an analysis of particular tunes. 32-bar AABA form? 12-bar blues? I barely remembered (from junior high band) the definition of a “measure,” much less how to keep 4/4 time or, worst of all, how to read music.

I’ll be darned, though, if knowing how to study and learn didn’t pay off. Though I probably had the worst tune-analysis skills of anyone in the class, I did acquire a rough facility for analyzing a song, and – what’s more – found that process remarkably interesting and fun. For my final project, I analyzed a little-known Duke Ellington tune, one which I’ve loved for a long time and which gradually revealed its inner structure as I listened over and over to it. I probably replayed the song about a hundred times to get it down for my paper – and even then I missed two key features of its structure.

What helped me even more than a facility for learning new things – even things as inconsequential as how to hear and diagram a 12-bar blues form – was being able to write clearly about what I was hearing. I found it was pretty easy to describe songs, artists, styles, et cetera, both objectively (“What are three main characteristics of bebop?”) and subjectively (“Explain why you like this song.”) Before I could get too high on myself, though, I did the math and realized that I’ve been writing fairly intensively for more than half my life – longer than most of my classmates have been alive. I’d better be halfway decent at it: I’m old.

Get Your Tickets

Sunday afternoon, the girls riffed on a Tinkerbell movie and a play that they had just seen to put on a “play” for Shannon and me. They prepared literally all morning, eventually creating elaborate paper costumes that changed each of them into fairies. They also handed out tickets. Here are mine, created by Julia:

Tickets

The right-hand ticket reads:
All
About
The
Play
A
drawing of spiderweb
Spider made this
drawing of teapot and cup
Tink[erbell]
Made
This

The play itself was staged in the afternoon, and took about five minutes. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they worked from a script. It was, nonetheless, pretty funny and entertaining.

Fairy Tale by Vivi

As told, apropos of nothing, on Tuesday morning:

Once upon a time there was a handsome daddy. He lived with his two beautiful daughters in a humble cottage in the woods. One day, they heard a noise outside. “What?” they said and went to look. There was nothing there. Then they heard a noise again. “What?” they said and went to look again. There was still nothing there. Then they heard a noise again and went to look again. This time there was a mean, horrible witch there. The end.

February Films: A Whole Bunch

I’ve fallen behind in my posts about the movies I’ve been watching all month, so here is a capsule summaries of everything since the 19th, when I watched The Town.

2/20: Pond Hockey: This is a great documentary about outdoor “pond” hockey in Minnesota – as much an examination of the State of Hockey’s love for the game, especially on outdoor ice, as the story of the 2007 National Pond Hockey Championships, held in Minneapolis.

2/21: Ghostbusters: Hilarious and brilliant. The only bad thing about it is the terrible theme song.

2/22: Foreign Correspondent: A great 1940 Hitchcock thriller about pre-World War II political machinations. A bit over the top now (especially at the end) it’s nonetheless really entertaining. The stunts are especially great.

2/23: Man of Aran: On my boss’s recommendation, I watched this “fictional documentary” about life in the 1930s on the remote Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. (As he said, “Next stop, Boston.”) Almost wordless, the film offers a set of sketches about the brutal life of the islanders. “Hardscrabble” doesn’t begin to describe it.

2/23: Lost in Translation: the 2003 dramedy with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, this is one of my all-time favorite movies, and it held up well to my nth viewing. I can’t think of many other works of art that so effectively set and maintain a mood: Radiohead’s OK Computer album, some great science fiction novels, maybe The Wire TV series…

2/24: District 9: A brilliant science fiction movie in which the disgusting aliens come off as much better creatures than the humans. It’s also very funny and full of action.

2/25: Manufactured Landscapes: Ostensibly a documentary about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, this is even more a movie of his photographs, which depict the “manufactured landscapes” of the industrialized world. The photography is gorgeous, and the narratives they explore – factory work and the Three Gorges Dam in China, shipbreaking in Bangladesh, and so on – are almost shocking. I was amazed by the stark counterpoint between the human-intensive production of relatively high-tech products and the ultra low-tech, even more human-intensive process of recycling those products.

2/26: Gosford Park. I’d seen this when it came out, in 2001, and remembered being impressed by the level of detail, the slow but not plodding pace, and the intricate plot. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around. On the surface, it’s a period piece, set on an English country estate after World War I, but below that it’s funny, alarming, and suspenseful – just plain good.

February Films: “Client 9”

I watched Client 9, the documentary about Eliot Spitzer’s rise and fall, tonight. I expected this movie to be rather superficial – more a recounting of Spitzer’s prostitution scandal than a serious investigation of it – but I was happily wrong about that. To the usual straightforward backstory, the documentary adds a series of amazing interviews with major figures in the scandal, including Spitzer himself, several aides, various members of the financial elite whom he attacked as attorney general of New York, and the call girl whom Spitzer preferred (though her “interview” is done off-camera and then voiced by an actress, interestingly).

Nobody in this movie comes off well. Spitzer, first and foremost, looks like a hard-driving bastard who was nonetheless genuinely concerned with curbing the excesses of the Manhattan bankers. The bankers present themselves as horribly entitled, deeply greedy plutocrats who were offended at Spitzer’s attacks, though not badly hurt. As the film points out, those bankers’ avarice nearly wrecked American capitalism just a few months after the scandal toppled Spitzer. The only glimmer of redemption comes near the end of the movie, when Spitzer simply and clearly admits that he was wrong to hire prostitutes, that he had betrayed literally everything he represented: probity, incorruptibility, public service, his family.

This admission comes only after the documentary draws some pretty clear lines of cause and effect between Spitzer’s attacks on financiers and the subsequent scandal. In seeking to weaken the financial class centered in Manhattan, Spitzer created many extremely powerful enemies, some of whom speak on camera about their desire to retaliate. In his brief tenure as governor of New York, Spitzer created more enemies, this time with politicians who quickly aligned themselves with the financiers to create a cabal of rich right-wingers with deep interests in finding a way to bring down Spitzer. It’s shameful and fitting that he gave them that opportunity by foolishly choosing, at the height of his power, to become Client 9.